The population dedicated to agriculture has decreased by 25% in 8 years throughout Europe. More than 30% of that population is over 65 and less than 0.5% are young people under 25. The replacement rate is at a critical level. The Focus Group: New Entrants into Farming of EIP AGRI has detected barriers to entry new agricultural entrepreneurs. Many of these barriers can be reduced with adequate training but the training curricula are obsolete in content and formats. Teachers do not find a communicative and practical vehicle for finding solutions to their doubts and quality pedagogical resources for improving their educational results. To cooperate in creation of new training materials able to reduce the gap between current curricula and agrarian entrepreneurship is, right now, almost impossible but is a very important part of the solution to the critical situation.
The goal of NewAgroNet is to fill these gaps by developing innovative pedagogical resources for agricultural teachers capable of generating new courses specifically adapted to the real needs of future agricultural entrepreneurs: these resources will enable the teachers to set up training modules that will tackle entrepreneurship skills in young farmers. These activities will bring to the creation of innovative business ideas from the students that will be assessed by business experts.
The expected long-term benefit is to contribute to a modern agricultural professional training based on ICT and focused on the real needs of future agricultural entrepreneurs helping to overcome the real difficulty they will encounter when finished they their training period and increase their success attracting by this way, more young people towards agrarian entrepreneurship.